Quote:
Originally Posted by thegeriatric
Seeing as we have ie, Firefox etc for both Mac and Windows, why not Chrome.
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We
have IE for Mac?
Even when we had IE, it was really only in namesake. The rendering engine was completely different from Windows IE and it had a very different feature set.
Firefox, Opera, and Safari all pretty much have feature and UI parity across platforms, but none of them fit in well on
all platforms. Firefox fits with Windows and Linux, but not on Mac OS X. Safari fits in on Mac OS X, but not really on Windows. Opera fits... well... somewhere? Windows? Maybe?
The Windows version of Google Chrome is a bit of an odd duck. It looks like it will fit in fine on Windows since, as Kraetos said,
everything looks and behaves a little differently on Windows, but as I quoted above, Mike Pinkerton wants "to build a
first-rate, native Mac product for Chromium". This would mean making an interface that feels native and hooks into system libraries (Keychain, spell checking, etc.) that aren't available on other platforms. This would mean that the Mac version would likely
not have the same feature set as the Windows version, adding and subtracting features in different areas. Might it be drastically different or only slightly so? Nobody really knows yet.
Take a look at Pinkerton's other big project (Camino) for ideas about how this may play out. Camino is in many ways "Firefox done the Mac way". It uses the same Gecko engine that powers Firefox, but it completely eschews Firefox's alien-looking XUL framework (meaning no extensions) and adds OS-integration features and a native UI that Firefox badly lacks. This is the direction that I
hope Pinkerton drives the Mac version of Chrome, whatever they decide to call it.